"Violence never solves anything," pacifists and gun prohibitionists like to
say. "Violence begets violence," they add. The statements are rattled off as if
they were empirical claims whose truth is obvious to all
intelligent people. In fact, they are baseless propositions that are
contradicted by ample and obvious evidence.

Unless you want to abolish the police, then you can not really believe that
"violence never solves anything" or that "violence begets violence."
Police carry weapons and use them when necessary to apprehend criminals.
Societies create police because people believe that doing so results in less
violence overall. Even British bobbies of the 19th century carried nightsticks.

When you watch the evening television news, you sometimes see stories such as
"Policeman thwarts kidnapping by wounding kidnapper" or "Rapist stopped when
policeman subdues him with billy club." No reasonable person sees such stories
and thinks, "Oh how terrible. The policeman used violence, and since violence
begets violence, we are sure to have even more violence in the future." Instead,
rational people think, "Because the criminal was stopped and arrested, we will
probably have a little less violence in the future. At least that criminal will
not be attacking anyone else for a while."

Most people think the same thing when citizens who do not work for the
government stop a crime. If the newspaper headlines read, "Students Wrestle
School Shooter to the Ground, Breaking His Arm," or "Elderly Woman Shoots
Burglar; DNA Tests Identify Him as Serial Murderer," reasonable and decent
people are happy that the crime was thwarted. They believe that the people who
stopped the crimes reduced violence.

Every year, at least 100,000 Americans (according to the lowest estimate), and
perhaps as many as several million Americans (the highest estimates),
successfully use gun violence, or the threat of gun
violence, to thwart violent criminal attacks. Less violent crime, less violence.

At the national level, history tells many success stories for violence. Violence
begat American independence, Greek independence, and Swiss independence.
Violence kept the United States united, and then freed the slaves. Violence
prevented Napoleon from becoming dictator of Europe, and prevented Hitler and
Hirohito from becoming dictators of Eurasia. The threat of violence, including
nuclear violence, deterred Stalin and the Soviets from conquering Western
Europe. Violence ended the Holocaust, established the modern state of Israel,
and stopped the Arabs from driving the Jews into the sea in 1948 and 1967.
Violence removed the Ceausescu communist dictatorship in Rumania. Violence
removed Afghanistan as a secure training base for worldwide terrorists in 2001.
Violence kept terrorists from crashing United Airlines flight 93 into
Washington, D.C.

Pacifists point out, quite correctly, that nonviolence can be successful, and is
sometimes more effective than violence. Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolence ended
British rule in India, and the People Power
movement in the Philippines removed the Marcos dictatorship in 1986.

Only a person who is willfully blind to history can deny that violence and
nonviolence can both be effective.

Some pacifists reply that violence should not be deemed an effective means of
ensuring peace unless it is perfectly effective every time it's tried. They
point out that World War II left Stalin in control of half of Europe, and that
the War Between the States did not solve the problem of racism. [fn: The federal
government did not prosecute that war to achieve racial equality, but to
preserve the Union, so it is unfair to call the war a failure because the
victors did not achieve an objective they didn't have. The war did eliminate
slavery. Freedmen after the war were victims of pervasive discrimination, but
discrimination is a far cry from slavery, under which one's children can be sold
to an owner in another state.

There is little we can do that is perfectly effective. If perfection is the
standard, then nonviolence fails the test as surely as does violence. The
peaceful People Power revolution in the Philippines has
left the Philippines with many social problems, including a terrorist Islamic
insurgency which was more effectively suppressed by the police state of
Ferdinand Marcos. Gandhi's nonviolent movement for Indian independence led to
British withdrawal and over one million deaths in the civil war that resulted.

When conscientious people refuse to use violence when necessary to defend
against the initiation of force, they help to propagate violence by criminals
and by criminal governments. Nonviolence allowed the worst violence in history
to take place: democracies failed to act against Fascism when victory would have
been easy.

Pacifists often cite the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s
as proof of the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. The reality is more complex.

Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement did engage
in a wide variety of nonviolent actions, such as bus boycotts, lunch counter
sit-ins, and demonstrations. Some of these, such as the Montgomery bus boycott,
succeeded quickly and directly. At other times, the benefits came more
indirectly, but were still substantial. For example, when Birmingham, Ala.,
police used German Shepherd attack dogs and fire hoses against peaceful
protesters; the images showed that it was the racist police, and not the civil
rights protestors, who were guilty of destroying public order. The event changed public opinion in the rest of the country, and thereby paved the way for
Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965.

But the part of the civil rights story that has been ignored by pacifist
myth-makers is the great extent to which civil rights activists armed themselves
for protection against terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan.

White supremacist tactics in the 1960s were just as violent as they had been in
the first Ku Klux Klan era, after Reconstruction, when the Klan would
methodically disarm the freedmen in a community and impose its reign of terror.
In the 1960s, over 100 civil rights workers were murdered. The U.S. Department
of Justice refused to intervene and prosecute the Klan or to protect civil
rights workers. And help from the local police was often out of the question;
Klan dues were sometimes collected at the local station.

In response, many blacks and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. John
Salter, a professor at Tougaloo College and a 1960s NAACP leader, wrote: "No one
knows what kind of massive racist
retaliation would have been directed against grass-roots black people had the
black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it." Salter
personally had to defend his home and family several times against attacks by
night riders. When Salter fired back, the cowardly night riders
fled. The unburned Ku Klux Klan cross in the Smithsonian Institution was donated
by a civil rights worker whose shotgun blast drove Klansmen away from her
driveway.

Many civil rights advocates viewed nonviolence as a useful tactic for certain
situations, not as a moral imperative allowing oneself to be murdered on a
deserted road in the middle of the night. For instance,
the Deacons for Defense and Justice, based in local churches, set up armed
patrol car systems in cities such as Bogalusa and Jonesboro, La., and were
successful in deterring Klan and other attacks on civil rights workers and black
residents. Sixty chapters of the Deacons were formed throughout the South.

Martin Luther King chose not to own a gun, but he explicitly defended the right
of self-defense. In 1959, the annual convention of the NAACP resolved, "we do
not deny but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense
against unlawful assaults." King supported the resolution, explaining that
violence "exercised in self-defense" was "moral and legal" everywhere. King
pointed out that even Gandhi did not condemn self-defense.

The claims of some pacifists that nonviolence is always more powerful than
violence cannot stand up to historical scrutiny. Sometimes nonviolence by itself
works just fine. Sometimes nonviolence on one
front works wonderfully when supported by violence on another front. And
sometimes only violence can succeed. From a prudential viewpoint, nonviolence
always deserves careful consideration. However, a rational person will sometimes
conclude that nonviolence is not an effective option.

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